Police Camera Footage Will No Longer Be Made Public in North Carolina
msn.comHalf good, half bad:
House Bill 972 does make such video accessible to people who can be seen or heard in it, along with their personal representatives ― but they must file a request to obtain the footage. If the request is denied, the petitioners must go before the state’s superior court. Requests can be denied to protect a person’s safety or reputation, or if the recording is part of an active investigation.
Current state law establishes that dashcam footage is in the public record, and it doesn’t address body camera footage. But police departments usually consider body camera footage to be part of an officer’s personnel file and thus private. The new law will make body camera footage accessible under the same stringent new conditions that dashcam footage will be.
So, you have to request the footage (Acceptable IMO), but they can choose to deny the request based on safety (okay), reputation (troubling and confusing. I see no reason to protect someone's reputation from themselves. Blur a public version if needed), or if it's part of an investigation (makes sense to me). Making sure departments don't use a loophole to keep officer camera data hidden is a plus.
The only case that comes to mind with regard to safety is if officers enter my residence illegally (e.g. by accident) and catch me in a compromised position. If you couldn't legally be in my house anyway, you sure as hell better not release footage of me to the public while you were there.
> Requests can be denied to protect a person’s safety or reputation, or if the recording is part of an active investigation.
As soon as there's a single subjective criteria by which footage can be denied, virtually all footage will be, period, the end. The "reputation" and "active investigation" parts make any concessions to the public completely and utterly worthless.
That's a strong statement, mostly because there's things implied in what you said that are not necessary to held true. For example, there's no reason we can't have a distinction between public release of a video, and allowing charged/affected parties (or their next of kin!) and their counsel to view the video privately at the police station for free (but restricted from recording). I think that would clear up the vast majority of problems, as the police could no longer falsely claim the footage needed to be preserved for some reason. If it was requested to be made public after that, and they refused, at least you then know what you're fighting for if you need to take it to court.
The police cannnot and should not be trusted to be the ones who decide matters of access. All video should be collected and dispersed by an independent citizen run board.
I think the point of the reputation bit is that there are probably other people in the video, too, and it might be their reputation that's at stake. Just because you're in the video doesn't mean that it's your reputation they're protecting.
Good point. A standard process and policy of anonymizing third parties would resolve this, but that takes effort, which means money. I would be okay with a nominal fee per requested released video to deal with this, such as $50 (or an hour at the prevailing hourly wage of a technician), otherwise the legislature should allocate funds for such. There is a balancing act.
> if it's part of an investigation (makes sense to me)
This part seems curious to me. Isn't that exactly when a person "who can be seen or heard in it, along with their personal representatives" (e.g. accused person and lawyer) would need access to such footage? Perhaps there is some nuance here about what constitutes an active investigation?
"Active investigation" means a the pre-arrest phase of investigation. E.g., they send a cop by a suspected trap house but don't want to tip off the residents that they are under suspicion. Otherwise, a criminal organization would just request all the body cam footage each week to make sure they aren't being investigated (or change their tactics in response to the police movements).
If there's an actual arrest and trial, the Supreme Court case of Brady v. Maryland (1963) requires that the state hand over any exculpatory evidence [1]. The state has to go out of its way to hand over evidence -- even if the defendant doesn't know it exists.
[1] "Exculpatory" = "might show that you are innocent." There's a long line of cases that define how broad that definition is.
* I am not your lawyer. Go get a criminal defense lawyer.
"active investigation" means anything the police want it to mean. Don't pretend it's a legally binding term.
What you're talking about is evidence in a trial, which can still remain sealed, and has nothing to do with the public being able to view the footage.
Yes, you get access to evidence if it's going to be used against you. That's a whole separate thing.
(Orignally this was a reply to a reply of this comment that apparently got deleted.)
What if while arriving on scene to a burglary there is body camera footage from an officer that appears to show someone running off and away from the scene carrying [whatever was stolen] and from that footage one could possibly conclude that the personal doesn't look like the person the police decided to accuse and prosecute. This could be exculpatory evidence and help clear you of the charges. (Obviously the prosecutor is suppose to let the defendent and court know of any known exculpatory evidence, but what if the police choose to withhold it from the prosecutor/court or don't think anything of the footage? )
What if it isn't going to be used against but could be exculpatory?
Of course, it's illegal for them to withhold any exculpatory evidence.
If its not public, you have minimal chance of discovering it if it isn't provided, so while it is illegal for them to withhold it, you'll never know it existed and was withheld unless someone who does know of it -- almost certainly the police themselves, or the person shown in it (quite possibly, the real criminal, who would be revealing their own identity by coming forward) -- actively reveals it. So, illegal or not, it makes it much easier for them to get away with concealing exculpatory evidence.
I see two things with the reputation bit, both positive and negative:
If you release someone being arrested, and afterwards it is a case of mistaken identity or one is found not guilty, it can affect reputation. Arrest records are public, and even when it winds up being mistaken identity or a not guilty verdict, it impacts lives and jobs. Some folks would base their judgement on how you acted or where you were in that video.
In addition to things such as domestic violence (perhaps we should blur out faces of the victims, for example, and not show their naked bodies to the public).
On the other hand, some of these could damage the Officer's reputation, and I wonder if they could be denied for that reason.
So if the police officer's reputation would be ruined by evidence of them committing a crime, then the footage can't be released?
Sounds like the exact point to me, block camera footage that shows crimes of officers.
I'm an NC native. The governor and most of the NC legislature are an embarrassment to our great state.
The history is complex, but basically, the Democrats controlled NC state politics for decades (weird, I know) and lost both the governorship and the legislature in the wake of backlash from Obama carrying NC in his first term. Big-money Republicans poured money into the state to ensure that a) Obama didn't carry NC in 2008 and b) Republicans would control the state during the key years following the US census, during time which they would gerrymander the ever living fuck out of our districts. Expect to hear lots of stories about our state's laws getting slammed by SCOTUS. There are several cases already in flight.
Don't try to make sense of it all -- it's about power and pandering and the worst most regressive parts of "conservatism".
Police are employed by the public. That footage, taken by public employees, in (mostly) public spaces, ought to belong to the public. I'm very concerned about privacy, the police / surveillance state, but I'd rather strap cameras to all officers than continue to allow them to literally get away with murder.
On it's surface making the footage not immediately public isn't a bad idea. The classic example would be a swat team showing up at the wrong house, busting down the door, and having video footage of John Q Citizen in his birthday suit. As long as there is a process for getting access to the footage that's impartial, that's fine.
What's really needed though is a way to escrow the footage. This is a solved problem in the tech world. The stream should be stored off site, cryptographically signed (public sig), in the control of a third party (though still a government entity, not a private corporation). Otherwise you'd be asking the criminals[1] to hold onto the evidence.
[1]: Not that all or even most police are criminals, but in the case where a police officer does commit a crime they are de facto criminals.
Why not just host it publicly but encrypted (Effectively doing what's being done now). Then release the key when a request is made.
Have the keys be a subkey of a DA, Judge or other high ranking individual. Then when the police 'lose' the key, the video can still be recovered.
Not even de facto, if they genuinely broke the law, they are de jure criminals!
Exactly. They're just de facto protected by overly police-friendly prosecutors and juries.
Phew, for a second there I thought we might have some transparency in our government. Glad to know that in the wake of historic video footage of public abuses, this is being taken away. Our leaders have listened and what they heard horrifies them! So now they don't have to listen, unless you come with a court order, that is.
If dash and body cam footage was available easily, you're not gonna like what you see. And people will then be up in arms because they are being harassed for their own bad behavior on camera given to public. I personally want body cam footage to be seen because I know it will cause that backlash and it will show the public how terrible their neighbors are and they'll understand why the police are so necessary (and necessarily rough sometimes) to keep society civil.
Part of the issue, however, is that police aren't civil to the public in the first place.
We expect folks in call centers to take all sorts of abuse. Folks working at the local pharmacy are supposed to keep a smiling face and professional demeanor, even if folks are yelling obscenities and insults in their direction. Folks tell retail workers that if they can't do that, or if they can't handle that, or don't like it, they need to find another job.
I don't see why we shouldn't expect that from police in most situations. I understand the need to be firm at times with some folks, but it isn't something that needs to be done at a traffic stop. Even if the person being pulled over is grouchy. Works both ways.
And yes, some folks will be harassed for their behavior, but I think it'll be a minimum.
But it is in other jurisdictions, and none of what you posit is true. I agree you may not like what you see, but that's the point.
The millions being spent on police cameras only serve as a gift to Tazer and the other paramilitary industrial complex companies. True reform will only come from the continued release of uncensored citizen video. The right to record must be protected at all cost.
> The right to record
It's hard to contort the First Amendment in such a way not to protect this.
I agree that this is one of the core rights of information age society.
Wait, wait. So it's a right to record, but if I go out and start recording stuff I get called out as privacy violator? So which way is it?
(I'm pro-recording here btw.)
The former, and strictly so. This version of "privacy" can't survive in a free society I don't think.
That's why I think the European concept of "right to be forgotten" is deeply flawed. I understand that they're trying to protect people from being negatively judged using outdated information, but the problem lies in the judgement, not the information. A better alternative would be "right to be not given a damn about".
They realized that they can only claim the camera fell off so many times.
This is tough. I see the intent and logic in this bill. At its core, this is a win for citizen privacy and data protection. It protects the integrity of criminal investigations, and limits public outrage without context. (E.g., a 30-second clip of a cop tackling someone presented as police brutality, omitting the previous 30 seconds of the individual resisting arrest or being a hazard to the health of himself or others.)
The downside, of course, is transparency at a time when public trust in police and proper oversight is at an all-time low. And the "oversight" piece of this is critical. We simply don't believe answers like, "Our internal investigation shows that the officer acted correctly."
So I do think this is the right move, but this needs to be coupled with real reform in independent police oversight and investigation.
The way I see it, this footage is there to safeguard both the public and police from lies about each other. It's not there for general perusal, and making it public will expose a lot of private situations that shouldn't be, especially for the civilians in the videos.
So long as the video is available for related court cases, now and in the future, that's fine. There does need to be a way to safe-guard it from destruction when someone wants to hide something, but I think that's a different matter than making the videos non-public.
Thus showing that nobody in the North Carolina government cares about minorities once again.
This is massive win for privacy.
As long as you're the right kind of person.
FOIA
"... makes police dashboard camera and body camera footage exempt from the public record."
I may be wrong but wouldn't this make the footage exempt from FOIA? (Unless the people involved filed the FOIA request ...)
FOIA applies only to federal records; similar state public-records laws have their own restrictions, based on what the state considers publicly-accessible records, and what it considers either protected personal information or sensitive government information; it seems likely that the sharply limited request process identified in the article for access to the police camera footage means that these are not accessible to the general public under the state's general public records law (otherwise, the limited request process would be superfluous.)